Commonplace Book

'Rather to his surprise, Rose took the letter. Study her eyes if you wish to gauge the potency of one strong dose of ridicule on an ingenuous young heart. She read that Mr. George Uploft had met "our friend Mr. Snip" riding, by moonlight, on the road to Beckley. That great orbed night of their deep tender love flashed luminously through her frame, storming at the base epithet by which her lover was mentioned, flooding grandly over the ignominies cast on him by the world. She met the world, as it were, in a death-grapple; she matched the living heroic youth she felt him to be, with that dead wooden image of him which it thrust before her. Her heart stood up singing like a craven who sees the tide of victory setting toward him. But this passed beneath her eyelids. When her eyes were lifted, Ferdinand could have discovered nothing in them to complain of, had his suspicions been light to raise: nor could Mrs. Shorne perceive that there was the opening for a shrewd bodkin-thrust. Rose had got a mask at last: her colour, voice, expression, were perfectly at command. She knew it to be a cowardice to wear any mask: but she had been burnt, horribly burnt: how much so you may guess from the supple dissimulation of such a bold clear-visaged girl. She conquered the sneers of the world in her soul: but her sensitive skin was yet alive to the pangs of the scorching it had been subjected to when weak, helpless, and betrayed by Evan, she stood with no philosophic parent to cry fair play for her, among the skilful torturers of Elburne House.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XLIII)

Commonplace Book

'...Two sentences had been passed on Juliana: one on her heart: one on her body: "Thou art not loved"; and "Thou must die." The frail passion of her struggle against her destiny was over with her. Quiet as that quiet which Nature was taking her to, her body reposed. Calm as the solitary night-light before her open eyes, her spirit was wasting away. "If I am not loved, then let me die!" In such a sense she bowed to her fate.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XLII)

Commonplace Book

'She knew nothing of books, this quaint old woman, and had a very antiquated taste in wall-papers; yet there would seem to be other ways of being wise, and it may indeed be held that books act too much as insulators between us and the earth, to the mysterious currents of which gnarled shapes of unlettered old men and women may be the more sensitive as lying closer to the Mother.

At all events, old Mrs Talbot did seem to have won certain confidences from life and death refused to more consciously alert ears. Hers had been that hearing beyond listening to which secrets are sometimes revealed.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVIII)

Commonplace Book

'There are excuses that we owe to ourselves, and we have a right to expect justice even from our own consciences. A sentimental conscience is the most tiresome of all altruists, and wilfully to indulge in remorse that we have not justly incurred is to blunt our consciences for real offences. The best repentance for our sins is a clear-eyed recognition of their nature, and the temptation in some flurry of feeling to take on our shoulders the mistakes of destiny with which we chance to have been involuntarily associated, is one to be resisted in the interests of that self-knowledge which is the beginning of self-development. Before we take the scourge in hand for our own shoulders let us be quite sure that we have sinned.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVII)

Commonplace Book

'...Happiness is such a materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, a bourgeois who has not yet attained the rank of a soul. The influence of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity has been upon the world. Christianity, no doubt, has robbed us of much - but then it has given us sorrow; it has taken away the sun, but it has brought us the stars. It is only in the starlight of sorrow that we become conscious of other worlds. The sun flatters our own little world with the illusion of a transitory importance; the stars show it its place in the universe, and teach it a nobler meaning for itself.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVI)

Commonplace Book

'...Now that he was awake, and could feel his self-inflicted pain, he marvelled at his rashness and foolishness, as perhaps numerous mangled warriors have done for a time, when the battle-field was cool, and they were weak, and the uproar of their jarred nerves has beset them, lying uncherished.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XXXVI)

Commonplace Book

'When two have lost each other in a crowd, it is best that one should stand still and await the other. Perhaps it were best for him to stand still here in life. Jenny would know where to seek him then - and maybe the dead had mysterious ways of bringing news to the living. He could wait a little while and see. For a little he could live - and listen.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXII)